Keynote Speakers

Chris Csikszentmihalyi is the ERA Chair in HCI and Design Innovation at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI). He cofounded and directed the MIT Center for Future Civic Media (C4) and founded the MIT Media Lab’s Computing Culture group, best known for developing political technologies that rebalance power between citizens, corporations, and governments. Trained as an artist, he has worked in the intersection of new technologies, media, and the arts for 16 years, lecturing, showing new media work, and presenting installations on five continents and one subcontinent. He was a 2005 Rockefeller New Media Fellow, and a 2007-2008 fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and has taught at the University of California at San Diego, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and at Turku University.

Cristina Leston-Bandeira is Professor of Parliament at the University of Hull. She works on comparative legislatures, focusing in particular on the relationship between parliament and citizens. She has established herself as an expert on the Portuguese Parliament, having several publications that have become standard works on the subject. In 2001 she was the co-recipient of the prestigious Prize Amaro da Costa for a study on the reform of parliament. She regularly gives advice and evidence to a range of parliaments on issues relating to public engagement. She is currently Deputy-Editor of The Journal of Legislative Studies, the Co-Convenor of the PSA specialist group on Parliaments and Legislatures, and one of the eight Commissioners of the Digital Democracy Commission set up by the Speaker of the House of Commons.

Katrín Jakobsdóttir is a member of Alþingi (the Icelandic Parliament) since 2007 for the Left-Green Movement. She was elected leader of the Left-Green Movement in 2013 and served as the minister for education, science and culture from February 2009 to May 2013. She is currently a member of the foreign affairs committee in the Icelandic Parliament and the EU-Iceland joint Parliamentary Committee. While in office Katrín led work that resulted in a new law on the media being passed and implemented in Iceland, which ensured the rights of journalists and started the implementation of IMMI (Icelandic Modern Media Initiative). She is a board member of the Nordic Game Institute and the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies at the University of Iceland. Before entering politics she worked in media and the publishing industry.

Julian Assange is founder of WikiLeaks which, since its founding in 2006, has published several million documents. Its best-known publication sets were the Afghan and Iraqi War Logs and the US Diplomatic Cables. Assange and WikiLeaks have, in the words of 60 Minutes “Rattled the worlds of journalism, diplomacy, and national security.” In 2012 Assange co-authored the book Cypherpunks about the encroaching mass surveillance of the internet. He believes that the first value to emerge from the new global civilisation of the digital age is the right to communicate: to receive and transmit information across boundaries. He asserts that the truth should be available to all. He believes passionately in the transparency of power that “the citizenry has a right to scrutinize the state”, especially a state which “hides behind cloaks of security and opaqueness.” [image courtesy of Allen Clark].